Blog currently on hiatus while I finish my midwifery training (April 4th, and counting down), but stay tuned for the June publication of Sima’s Undergarments for Women: The Paperback, forthcoming from Penguin Press….
Books
So I started reading a book.
A real book.
Actually, it started shortly after I posted about how I don’t read anymore because blah blah being a midwifery student is so busy. And I thought, really? Really really? Because I love reading. It defines me, or used to. And I thought, what about my daughters? If they don’t see me reading, what will make them readers?
So I picked up a book. It felt nice in my hands. And it was about NYC, and the Twin Towers, but not heavy-handed, just a story, a remember when kind of tale.
And then I was reading the book. Let the Great World Spin, by Colin Mcann. It’s an amazing book. It’s smart and beautiful and heartbreaking, and it takes place in the 1970s, and okay, so I wasn’t born until 1975, but I swear I can remember the prostitutes under the Major Deegan just as he describes, they come to me suddenly, a small girl looking out the car window on a dark night and bright women under the bridge, waiting.
And: there’s a character named Tillie.
And then I idly turned to the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because of course I love reading the acknowledgments at the back of the book, and I saw there was a photo credit, so I turned to look for the photo, and it wasn’t there, and neither were 50-odd pages of my book.
Stopped me cold.
How could I keep reading knowing I’d hit a gap? I was lost. It was terrible.
I hadn’t figured my way to a solution –the chain bookstore downtown, get them to replace it, but when and with what receipt–when my wonderful in-laws showed-up. And by showed-up I mean came to town to take care of Eva & Tille while Jordan was away at a conference and I was on-call and please, could you come all the way from Ontario to help out, and, yes, they could.
And what should my mother-in-law be reading but Let the Great World Spin, and an intact version.
I’m all caught up now. Thank goodness, as it was Tillie herself whose voice was missing from my version.
Don’t let me forget to read fiction again, okay?
Bette Midler?
Do you know Bette Midler?
A friend of my former editor — my fabulous former editor, who is fabulous because she thinks of things like this even though Sima has a new home for paperback production — suggested that although Bette Midler has retired from movie-making (something about loving Las Vegas live?) she might have a “special interest” in playing Sima.
Playing Sima in Sima: The Movie, that is.
Or that should be, but isn’t quite yet, but really could be, don’t you think?
I have an agent’s address, but not a lot of hope that a letter from me will really be passed on.
But that’s where you come in.
Do you know Bette Midler? Someone who knows her? Someone who once tried not to smile too self-consciously while making small talk with her at the buffet table at their great-nephew’s bar mitzvah?
Or how about Olympia Dukakis? Patty Lupone? Meryl Streep? (Must always include Meryl Streep).
Everyone knows there aren’t thoughtful parts for older actresses. Here’s one.
(Though, looking at Bette Midler’s Las Vegas Package Vacation websites, I’m wondering if she wouldn’t actually make a better Timna…)
Anyway, give a holler if you know someone I should know, you know?
Meantime, on the midwifery front: client privacy is paramount, but when they go on the news about their hotel-birth I think I’m allowed to brag that, hey, I was there:
The Thousand Words Picture
Sima at the equator. That’s THE Equator. Really. It’s strange how proud of her this makes me.
Human Lactation
A publication of a different sort to announce: an article I co-authored with an awesome former prof of mine, “Knowledge and attitudes regarding infant feeding practices among reproductive aged university women: An experimental evaluation,” has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Human Lactation.
My first academic publication.
And yes: that’s a book about bra-shops and an article about breastfeeding. Don’t ask. I can’t answer.
Meantime I have an interview with the CBC coming up, which marks one of the last hurdles I had to jump to become truly Canadian: far as I can tell, every Canadian has appeared on the CBC at least once.
I’ll be appearing on On the Island, which is, well, Vancouver Island radio. I get to go to the downtown studio and everything: pretty exciting, since most of my other radio interviews took place in our basement storage room to avoid being interrupted by the kidlets.
All of the finalists for the Victoria Butler Prize will be interviewed, which is great except that I’ll probably be asked something like, Which of the finalists have you read?, and the answer will be none, because I don’t read.
Ever.
Because 4th year midwifery school is kicking my ass. Really, I just got sent 4 wonderful hardcover books for my birthday –thank you Toronto sibs-in-law!–and I thought, how ironic, sending books to a novelist would seem to make sense except for that all the reading & writing I do now is medical history and narrative.
(“When are you planning on taking another set of vitals?” my preceptor asked me last week, just after a birth. “Just as soon as I finish this paragraph,” I told her, wrapped up as I was in my description of the delivery. She looked at me. I put down the pen. Sometimes as a writer it’s easy to forget that, despite the copious amounts of paperwork demanded for every birth, the narrative never comes first.)
Newsflash
Late-breaking Sima news:
Hebrew language rights have been sold!
Sima has been shortlisted for the City of Victoria Butler Prize!
Back-to-school Clinical-intensive-at-UBC news:
Orca whale sighting on my ferry commute!
And finally: results are in from the Duo Tang challenge:
Several Canadians emailed me about my spelling of Duo Tang. A PhD in Canadian Literature gently explained (well, actually she called me “rookie”) that it’s DUO tang. A grade school teacher (conveniently my sister-in-law) voted instead for Doutang or Duo-tang.
Why did they email me and not post on my blog? I have no idea. Very Canadian.
Regardless, since no Americans commented I will reveal nothing. Ask the Orcas.
Back to work
Heading into Vancouver to start off my final year of school with typical mix n’ match: this evening I’ll be meeting with a book club about Sima, and then tomorrow begins another clinical intensive. I’m feeling all out of sorts about leaving the girls–I’m only in Vancouver until Friday, but I know it’s going to be a busy semester with a busy clinic and who knows when I’ll ever be home.
It’ll be fine. I know it’ll be fine. It’s just that I hate transitions. But then, who doesn’t?
I called Eva’s school this morning. Actually, I’ve called 3 times in the last week, but thank goodness they’d never know that since I never give my name. Because I am That Mother. My questions are innocent enough: When is the 1st day of school? (Next Monday.) Must I really register my daughter for the 3rd time in person? (For me they made an exception. So, okay, I did have to reveal my name there.) Finally: That meet-the-teacher picnic, what time exactly?
Underlying them all: Are we going to be the parents who can never make anything because Jordan teaches & I have clinic? How is one supposed to pull this off, exactly?
We’ll figure it out. Meantime: for my American readers & in the spirit of Back to School, the Word of the Day is: Dou Tang.
Okay, so it’s two words. Here’s a hint: they’re on Eva’s school supply list, and though I’ve held one a hundred times I never knew a word for it in American English. Guesses?
The end of summer
It’s a cool September day, and I’m home in Victoria.
Glory be, and thank goodness for the end of summer.
Because my kids are covered in scabbed-over mosquito bites.
Because when I unpacked our luggage, sand spilled onto the floor.
Because my neck aches from other people’s too-puffy pillows.
Because it took forever to bury Ted Kennedy, and summer ended there but still we had to go through the motions for a few days. And because my dad and I waited hours for Obama’s speech and still missed it, laying flat on my parents’ bed watching the eulogies, my father too exhausted from his own brain-cancer radiation to speak much; me not knowing what to say, or how to say what to say.
And wasn’t it shocking, after all: not the death, not the disease, but the pomp & circumstance, the beauty & order both of the Roman Catholic ceremony & of the Americal political burial: all ritual, all symbolism, all reported with the most catch-your-breath innocence.
Just listen:
Soon, seven riflemen were firing three volleys. Soon, the shadow of a bugler was playing “Taps,” as heat lightning stunned the night sky. Arlington was dark; a long day had ended. But come Sunday morning, cemetery officials say, the green of the grass will be smooth again, the hole filled, the sod laid. Only then it will feature a white wooden cross made by the cemetery’s carpenter, and a white marble marker that bears the name of another Kennedy, this one as distinct and as human and as accomplished as the others, a man in his own right.
EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY, it will say. 1932-2009
At Barnard I majored in European History. In particular, I was a WWI buff. I wrote my senior thesis on masculinity in Britain during the Great War. (Yes, I called it The Great War, for reasons I felt passionate about at the time but can no longer explain.)
Alongside my thesis I wrote a narrative account of the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey on November 11th, 1920. It was the ultimate orchestrated funeral, and it provided an incredible catharsis from the nightmare of the war.
Every aspect of the soldier’s journey from France to London was carefully planned–from the coffin made by Queen Victoria’s coffin-makers to the war widows who sat in each pew during the burial. The ritual resonated: on the first day alone, 40,000 Britons queued in the rain for the chance to pay their respects to the fallen soldier, perhaps their own son, husband, brother, lover.
I’d thought we’d forgotten how to do that: not just the pomp & circumstance, but also the shared public mouring ritual –remembering one man while delineating the shared values & symbols of a country.
We haven’t.
It’s kind of nice to think, in a sad, end-of-summer kind of way.
Hot in the city
August in New York City, in a old Victorian home with no air conditioning, ten thousand steps, and two young children.
I’m melting.
My parents look at Jordan and me languishing on the livingroom couch, and at Tillie & Eva, sweaty and heat-rashed, and declare that we are all hopelessly Canadian.
It’s true. Not so much the Canadian part — Toronto can give NYC a run for its money when it comes to miserable, muggy summers — but after 4 years of Pacific Northwest living, I find the heat pretty miserable.
The cold, too.
When I was 18 I went on a year-long trip to Israel, to milk cows on a kibbutz and plan my future utopian commune and — well, and to disco every Friday night. On my program were a whole slew of Vancouverites, many of whom are still close friends — and two of whom now live, like everyone else in the free world, in Brooklyn.
The Vancouverites were famous for two things. First, they always thought everything looked like Vancouver. The hills of the Judean desert at sunrise? Looked like Vancouver. The ancient Arab port city of Akko? Vancouver.
Second, they had absolutely no tolerance for heat or cold of any kind. I remember watching with curiosity as they staggered from the bus on a 40+ Celsius day. It was hot, sure. Okay, it was very, very, hot. But to me it was a smoke-in-the-shade kind of day (of course, every 18 year old North American planning a utopian community in the Negev desert must smoke), whereas they looked….ill.
And now it’s my turn.
New York is confusing for me. I can’t handle the weather, but I surprise myself by knowing my way around…navigating through a subterranean subway tunnel last night I thought, isn’t it odd how this is still mine? And then again, isn’t it odd, also, how it isn’t?
I once identified strongly with the city and thought I’d live here forever, and now NY is just the place I grew up. But of course nowhere is just the place you grew up — the place you grew up is the place. And maybe everyone has that strange feeling of returning home, always a little surprised to find how well home has existed without them. New York is New York. I’m overwhelmed by it each time. There are so many people, so much activity, and — a personal favorite (favourite?) of mine — so many, many, refreshing drinks to choose from at one of the millions of independent grocery-marts that make each neighborhood.
Jordan says that he could have married someone from anywhere, and been stuck visiting in-laws in, say, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Instead he married a girl from NYC, and gets to vacation regularly, albeit with some physical discomfort, in one of the greatest towns in the world.
But while he’s gotten to know the city through me, his small-city Ontario view of NY has also altered my own. ”New York always looks like a movie set to me,” he told me years ago. It seemed so bizarre at the time, but now I’ll often catch myself looking at something — last night, for example, a restored waterfountain set against a pre-war Village backdrop — thinking, wow, looks like a movie.
I have truly a ridiculous amount to say on this topic — has there perhaps been a different NY for each stage of my life? — but…I’m too darn hot.
And now I’ve written an entire post about the weather. Can’t get more Canadian than that.
Out of the fog, into the fog
It’s a beautiful day in Upper Kingsburg. Hot & clear skies: no small feat for Nova Scotia. Eva and Tillie water-winged it around the pond while I swam out past the rocks & sand & scary seaweed (as a child I saw a Little House on the Prairie episode in which a girl drowns after getting her foot caught in a seaweed patch; subsequently her mother forces Laura into her dead daughter’s clothes and locks her in the cellar. Abundant seaweed still makes me shiver) to where the water was deep and cool and clean.
All around the pond is green, with just a few homes and barns perched on the grassy hills. It’s a beautiful –breathtaking –spot. I floated on my back a bit and stared up at the perfect blue sky.
I haven’t written in awhile, and partly it’s because I’ve been on vacation, but partly it’s because my father has brain cancer.
I’m going to admit something really dumb: for years and years I’ve heard of people who seem healthy and then get told they have cancer, and suddenly they’re truly, incredibly, sick.
And I never understood it.
I always kind of wondered: What if they hadn’t been diagnosed? Would they still be a healthy-seeming person if they just never knew?
I told you upfront: stupid.
What I understand now is how the cancer grows before the symptoms present. And then once they present, with some kinds of cancer, things change quickly.
So, to go from my mom’s timeline: on July 9th my parents were dancing together at a wedding. Then came a strange numbness down my father’s right side, & then he hit a parked car & then the MRI & then the biopsy & now the treatment, and he’s been in bed all weekend, weak, and he knows though I don’t say that you can hear the cancer in his voice.
I’ll be home in a few days. Though there’ll be nothing for me to do, really. And then we’ll be off again way out west. And then Eva starts kindergarten and I start my final year of midwifery training and both feel like varying degrees of overwhelming, though I know we’ll muddle through. (Have I mentioned before that Eva’s [public] education will be conducted in French? French. I picture her singing “Frere Jacques” over and over, which tells you just about all you need to know about my French).
So you can see about floating in the pond with blue sky above. I’m going with the idea that if I can pack in enough of those moments I’ll be able to take them out later, try them on again at some future date, feel & touch that watery, floating feeling.
I’ll let you know if it works.
